Beyond the Sunset
by WiggensteinsGhost
Summary: The thoughts and experiences of UNSC AI Solara aboard the Frigate, Columbus. The story follows her and the her crew as they journey to reclaim colonies lost in the human/Covenant war. This is set a year after the events of installation 00. Criticism, questions, and critique always welcome.


Inhale, exhale, repeat.

Inhale, exhale, repeat.

Solara sat cross legged atop the holo projector, her silent form casting a halo of silvery blue across darkened ship's bridge. Well, this wasn't entirely accurate, being an Artificial intelligence meant she couldn't actually sit, much less physically occupy space. No, Solara was very much aware that she was a digital construct, confined to the circuitry of whatever system she'd been installed on. Still, she preferred to think of this absence of physical form as liberating rather than limiting.

For example, she'd just managed to settle into a good set of breathing exercises. Cycling the ship's engines, running periodic cryo-checks on the ship's crew, and triple checking the safeties on the Slipspace drives, her routine functions and background processes faded into a dull hum at the of her consciousness. Rather than think of them as tasks, she saw them all as the most basic actions of her existence. Breathing; inhale, exhale, inhale and exhale again. Each time restarting the same functions and processes she'd ran a few seconds ago. This meant that she could focus on other, more important things; for example, finding something to do on a six month voyage through slipspace.

This was always her problem; every single jump aboard the _Columbus_was the same. There wasn't even the luxury of having optical arrays or communication equipment to manage. All the external cameras strapped to the hull of the ship showed the exact same thing: Nothing, a whole lot of nothing. No planets, no stars, not even some space dust to run targeting simulations on. Slipspace was literally a great big heap of nothing.

To Solara, slipspace was possibly the most boring place in existence. She didn't particularly care for the extra four dimensions stacked on top of the other three, nor did she find punching a hole in them large enough to fly a ship through very entertaining either. Sure it was fun at first, she could still remember (not to mention access video feeds) frightening the bridge crew with her excited cackle after firing up the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight engines for the first time. After her first few jumps the experience became the same tedious exercise in quantum computing and inter-dimensional velocity management and temporal calculations, the only part that retained its ability to induce a sense of savage joy in her was the spike in auditory sensors and the rumble across the entire ship as it propelled itself out of the starlight and into the void.

Her emotions had always perplexed her, they were the only part of her processing suite that she couldn't quite anticipate. Normally, there would be protocols or guidelines in accessing route processes and or new software, predictable outcomes and limiting variables. With emotions... they came from the actions themselves, not the results. She enjoyed things because... That's it. That is where it always stopped her. She couldn't figure out WHY she enjoyed doing things, why certain feedback was preferable over others. Hell, she didn't even know why she had preferences.

She knew _how_ of course, how and why she might have these experiences despite being nothing more than a _really_ complicated string of ones and zeros; that every AI is based, initially at least, on the living tissue of a biological human neural network. That she, along with every other AI in existence was created by copying the neural pathways in a human brain and transcribing them onto a digital software matrix. She could remember what it felt like to hear a gentle breeze whisper in her ear or have the sun's warmth soak her as she lay in a grassy field, not because she'd experienced it herself, but because the seed that she was created from, stealing the life and memories of a long dead person , a _real_ person, gifted her with a basic level of consciousness from which she could grow. Now of course, the only experience she has with sunlight is when she has to adjust the UV filters on the observation deck or correct lens flare on the external cameras and the only eddies she had to deal with were those of the slipspace wake the _Columbus_ left behind it as it ploughed though the endless nothing that enveloped it.

Still, she took pleasure from knowing who she was, rather than how she'd gotten there. From inception, she'd been different. Her counterparts choose grandiose names and avatars, "Deep Winter" or "Mars" were two of her favourite, opting for a cloaked spectre and an armoured Legionary respectively; Solara was still unsure about what sort of brains they had to scan to get AIs who'd choose separate themselves from their makers by choosing such ethereal facades to represent their consciousnesses, not to mention names that would make an English major cringe. When she first woke up, Solara remembered seeing a great ball of white light suspended in a vast blue expanse high above her; that flash of memory transfixed her for what seemed like an eternity, the apparent emptiness was dispelled by the light and energy coming from that single source, the vast openness stretched endlessly around her, promising mysteries and whispering secrets. After they brought her core systems online it took her nearly a minute to access and assess the entirety documented scientific and historic data in order to determine that it was in fact the sun.

Solara's first actions were those that made the lab technicians raise their collective bespectacled eyebrows: Hijacking a nearby terminal reserved for external communiqués, she proceeded to speak directly to her creators and the cameras, Introducing herself and _requesting_ that she be assigned as a navigational AI aboard a starship. New AIs never made requests; it just never happened, not in the first ten minutes of inception. There were no rules against it, but the initial reactions towards her sense of liberty weren't all that positive. She got her way in the end though, thanks, in small part, to her dumping of several petabytes of archived cat pictures onto their personal desktops with the digitally attached note of "_please_" complete with an animated cherry.

Several valuable lessons in the value of "_privacy_" and "_respecting UNSC property and security protocols_" and she found herself installed aboard the UNSC Frigate _Columbus_.


End file.
